Accidentally in Code

Tag: Organization

  • Making, Managing, Creating – Time

    Sacha wrote a lovely post about her free time, and how she protects it. This led me to her reflections on overtime and the whole concept of “having too much time on your hands” by herself and by Cory Doctorow. (Incidentally, it’s great when people have large archives and link back to stuff you haven’t read).

    Time
    Credit: flikr / monkeyc.net

    Doing a lot, and having too much time on my hands have both been things that people have said about me lately. The having too much time was described as “prioritizing badly” (i.e. should you be working on things like that when your thesis is not complete) but I think it amounted to the same thing.

    What does all this mean? Because I don’t feel like I have too much time – I’m forever rushing from one thing to the next, missing out on things I want to do because other things takes precedence. I don’t know about doing a lot, because when I compare what I manage to do to the list of things I want to do what I manage to do seems a very small amount.

    Over the holiday, I plan to focus on achieving more and being happier in the process. So far, this means that I want to carve out my time to be productive and balance it with time doing stuff I enjoy – skiing, reading novels, hanging out with my boyfriend and my friends. I want to learn how to say, I’ve not achieved everything I wanted to today, but it’s time to stop work now. And stick to it.

    My biggest challenge? Strange schedules at university. Lectures in the evening throw off my days, last semester working Saturdays threw my week out of kilter. Lack of schedule means that I can allow these things to derail me and then my days lose their “flow”. At the start of the semester, I was working from about 8-4, and taking a break to go to the gym or whatever, or spend time with friends, and then any extra time I would spend reading articles and books that were helpful, but not as difficult to read as an academic paper.

    But then crises hit, and I work the evenings because I think I need to. Eventually my mornings disappear and instead of a regular schedule I’m rushing about, forcing myself to make time to exercise, and frantically trying to be productive in every moment that’s left. The flow is gone. I can’t pick out the rhythm from the frantic din.

    I think, if I’m more strict about stopping at the end of the day, I’ll be more eager to start the day in the morning.

    How about you? How do you manage an overly flexible schedule or challenges such as non-standard working hours?

  • Week in Brief

    For this week:

    • Find out what’s going on with knee, really hope I can ski and kickbox again (will be tears if I can’t!). – things OK, got a “conservative” treatment plan, and I’m allowed to go kickboxing again (yay!)
    • Gym 5 times. – four! PT nearly ended me on Tuesday, oooh the pain!
    • CA Project report. – see it here.
    • Make Applets work. – nope, didn’t even try to get this done. Thought about it… but too fried!
    • Finish reading 7 Habits. – I love this book. Gives me great perspective.
    • Submit marks – end of TA-ing (yay!). Words cannot describe how pleased I am that this is over!
    • Buy iPhone (v excited about this)

    I also:

    • Spent time with my friends in London.
    • Saw my Leicester friend, caught up – this was great, can’t wait for her to get an internet connection!
    • Read 3 novels – I hardly ever make time to read novels lately, so this was really nice.
    • Spent time with my parents.

    It’s been really nice to take some time for me, to choose to read a book instead of to do what’s “productive”. I’m still a little jet-lagged and haven’t been sleeping that well, but I’m going back to Ottawa more chilled out, I think, with some ideas of what I want to spend time and energy on over the winter break before the craziness starts again.

    For this week:

    • Holiday Science Lecture – revise slides, either no text or needs to be translated
    • Practice, Practice, Practice!
    • Go skiing
    • Spend minimal xmas with boyf and his parents – no tree, not many presents, as little fuss as possible.
    • Make Twitter landing page and turn off follower notifications.
    • Delete all Twitter follower notifications from email, and process the rest of it.
    • Unsubscribe from things.

    My Holiday Science Lecture is next Monday (December 28th), entitled “Art, Life and Programming”. You can see what I plan to talk about here and no doubt I’ll be blogging about it as I revise it and practice. If you’re in Ottawa, it’s free and you’re welcome to join. It’s aimed at children age 7-10, but I hope it’ll be interesting to anyone with an interest in technology. I’m really nervous about this, especially the French one – in the morning! So wish me luck.

  • 20% of the Time, 80% of the Value

    Pareto Principle Option 2
    Credit: flickr / Sleepy Valley

    If you look, you’ll see the Pareto Principle everywhere. Last week, I saw it in grad school. I was having my 20% – and it was awesome! But it does make me sad about the 80% of my time – this is the time that I spend marking, doing assignments that seem pointless and reading papers that I need to know the contents of, or might be useful, but turn out not to give me that zing of inspiration.

    In the 20%, I’ll work 12 hours a day and enjoy it. I’ll wake up every morning fired up and excited for the day ahead of me. In the 20%, things take less time than expected. They sometimes turn out better than expected, too.

    I think this is why I don’t want to convert to a PhD – the Comprehensive Exam, a thesis proposal, the TA-ing… I can see this will be the 80%. I think there are other ways I can get much of the value from the 20% of the PhD I want, basically by writing a large masters thesis. Perhaps I can summarize some choices, by saying, is this in my 20%, or will it contribute to it? Make it bigger?

    I want to live in the 20%. But I recognize there’s a lot of stuff that I do in the 80% that enables the 20% to happen.

    • I have to mark because I TA, but there’s a 20% when I really manage to communicate understanding to a student, and they go away excited about what we’re talking about.
    • This semester, I spent a lot of time on assignments I thought were pointless, but they did improve my understanding so in my 20% I implemented something that I wouldn’t have known how to do in September.
    • Yes, a lot of the papers I read are a little dull, but I hoard the knowledge and later when it’s time to connect the dots or something clicks… some of them turn out to be useful.

    So I think the question is, how do I maximize the 20%? I plan to explore this over the winter break, as after this week my TA-ing and course will be done with. I’d love your thoughts as to what your 20% is, and how you maximize it, if you do.

  • Week in Brief

    Last week:

    • Recreate conversational graphs from re-factored code
    • Implement clique finding algorithm for Twitter Conversation Graphs
    • Visualize results of clique finding
    • Create presentation for class on Cliques/Conversation Graphs – see it here.
    • Marking
    • Re-marking previous assignment – couldn’t do this, have to investigate further for fairness.
    • Girl Geek Dinner – Awesome, I blogged about it here.
    • Gym 4 times – made it three times – completely underestimated how bad jetlag would be.
    • Keep it together – I expected last week to be really stressful, but actually it was pretty great! Getting to focus on the stuff that I think matters made working 12 hours a day seem pretty easy (until Friday, when I totally crashed!), and I was really pleased with how much I got done.

    I’m back in the UK now, getting my knee checked out and catching up with my family. I’ll be heading back to Canada early next week. So this week I’ll be kicking back a little, catching up on some reading, seeing some friends and eating tasty food from M&S! So:

    • Find out what’s going on with knee, really hope I can ski and kickbox again (will be tears if I can’t!).
    • Gym 5 times.
    • CA Project report.
    • Make Applets work.
    • Finish reading 7 Habits.
    • Submit marks – end of TA-ing (yay!).
    • Buy iPhone (v excited about this)

    Have a great week!

  • Scheduling at 80% of Capacity

    Lately, things have been somewhat chaotic. I don’t like it. It makes me stressed, overwhelmed, and unproductive.

    Credit: flikr / kevindooley
    Credit: flikr / kevindooley

    On Saturday, Treena and I headed out of town for breakfast and a chat. We caught up, and I was talking about how I had just hit this point where I was so overwhelmed I was having a hard time being productive. I’m trying to get a grip; I’ve managed to delegate something that was causing me a giant headache and I’ve been trying to do more things that make me happy rather than I feel I should do (this means I’ve finally caught up on this season of Ugly Betty – love that show).

    Credit flikr / flashcurd
    Credit flikr / flashcurd

    However, it’s not enough. At the end of the semester… I think the picture below captures it. It’s like when the snow melts and everything you’ve done all semester needs to be done and final. There’s a cascade of stress, as anything that takes longer than anticipated slides into everything else…

    Credit: flikr / mint imperial
    Credit: flikr / mint imperial

    Treena tells me (I’m paraphrasing here):

    In production, you always schedule at 80% of capacity just in case.

    I try to say that I do, it’s just more has gone wrong than the 20% allocated for. Maybe I’m right – I mean, over 4 hours a week spent on physio at the start of term… there’s 20% right there. Having to remark a whole assignment? That’s 20% and it’s happened twice.

    Then later, I think about it some more, and realize – I don’t know what my capacity is anymore. Some weeks I’ll work 80 hours and be OK with that. Last week I didn’t achieve anywhere near that (I tried to, but I was having terrible problems focusing). I’ve hit the point where my cup is overflowing – and not in a good way.

    Credit: flikr / 96dpi
    Credit: flikr / 96dpi

    So Treena is right – I’ve not been scheduling at 80% of capacity. The fact that I don’t even know what my capacity is anymore, tells me I’ve really screwed things up – I’ve sprinted and crashed. I need to be doing 50 hours every week, not 80 hours one week and 20 the next. I shouldn’t be at the point where what needs to happen this week makes me want to curl into a ball and cry.

    Credit: flikr / hufse
    Credit: flikr / hufse

    It’s probably too late for this semester. If I can get through this week, it’s over. For next semester, what can I do to learn what my 80% is and schedule for that?

    • Working Saturdays – don’t do it. Saturday lunchtime labs screw up my whole weekend, they’ve often overran as well as assignments have been due on Sundays and I feel compelled to stay longer to help.
    • TA-ing period. No TA-ing in French (it’s much more stressful for me), and if I TA at all it will be a “proper” CS course as the obligatory courses for non-CS students are much harder.
    • Delegate before it’s panicking me. I arranged for someone to take charge of something last week that I probably should have arranged a month ago.
    • Better sleep schedule. I was up early for the first chunk of the semester, but then I work late into the evening and it spills over to the following day when I sleep late… need to avoid this and keep on a more regular schedule – especially since the morning is often my most productive time.
    • Do things that make me happy. Read more novels. Go do things I enjoy. Spend time with my boyfriend. I’m 24 – it’s too young to do nothing but work.
    • Email. Takes too much time. Unsubscribe from everything I can. This will include Twitter notifications. I should make a custom Twitter landing page indicating that I don’t check the notifications and that I mostly follow back people who talk to me, so send me an @ message saying hello. Once the end of the semester is over (no more panicked emails from students) I should be able to check it just once a day. Try and move to inbox zero.
    • Courses. Take a course that I enjoy and am interested in. This semester’s course was one I had to take, which definitely made me less motivated. That kind of workload in something I’m more passionate about would not be as big a problem. Spend more time at the beginning of the semester going to a few courses and picking the one that I will enjoy most – this will pay off later.
    • Some tasks get bigger the longer you put them off. Last week, I spent several hours trying to clear my email. On my desk, there’s a pile of paper 6 inches high. At this point, they become so large I need to set aside a lot of time to deal with them. This makes them much more intimidating, and I put them off even longer… it’s a vicious cycle. Try not to get into it in the first place.

    This is everything I can think of for now, but as I try to find my 80% no doubt more will come up. How about you? How do you find your 80%?

  • Week in Brief

    Last week was a bit of a disaster:

    For this week:

    • Minor website edits
    • Read 8 papers – was never going to happen
    • Clear email… it’s got completely out of hand (worse than ever before) – made a lot of progress on this, but still lots left
    • Social Capital, Trust Agents and the New Tribe event
    • Students and Startups
    • An Introduction to Processing – make slide-deck.
    • Marking (again)
    • Gym 4 times
    • Recreate conversational graphs from re-factored code – Nearly done
    • Implement clique-finding algorithm for Twitter Conversation Graphs
    • Re-read 7 Habits – Got started, part way through
    • Get started on giant pile of papers.

    For next week, I fly back to the UK on Sunday so I’m going to have to focus on the stuff that must be done by then and not crowd my task list with things that are important, but can wait until I’m there/get back.

    • Recreate conversational graphs from re-factored code
    • Implement clique finding algorithm for Twitter Conversation Graphs
    • Visualize results of clique finding
    • Create presentation for class on Cliques/Conversation Graphs
    • Marking
    • Re-marking previous assignment
    • Girl Geek Dinner
    • Gym 4 times
    • Keep it together

  • A Crash Course in Leadership

    Leadership
    Credit: flickr / Dunechaser

    Disclaimer: don’t take any advice from me. I’m known for giving terrible advice, particularly when it comes to relationships. Also, don’t let me set you up. It invariably ends in disaster.

    WISE has enough money to last through January, I think. Then we’ll have to work something out, or stop.

    I’m not down with stopping, I’ll work something out. Watch me.

    Here’s my advice: no matter how good the cause, don’t be the driving force in starting (or restarting) a student organization. Particularly one with no stable source of funding. In fact, don’t ever be President of a student organization. Get involved, sure, but pick a clearly defined role and do it well enough that no-one will put anything else on you, but no so well that you give the impression of not having enough to do.

    The positive: I get to work with a great group of people, sometimes we get to put on events (like last week) that are truly useful and thought-provoking, and inspire debate. I get to feel like I’m involved in something that will genuinely make a difference, even if a small one, to some of the girls and women at the University.

    However being President involves a lot of rubbish things too. It involves the stuff that it says in our constitution, but also taking care of or finding people to take care of the stuff that other people aren’t doing or won’t do. I’ve worked out who I can rely on – and the people who you thought would, don’t always make the cut. Worse is, last week, I got two complaints and another person requesting to be removed from our mailing list, in a way that suggested she thought we’d scraped it off the internet (we don’t do that, obviously, if we have her email address it’s because she gave it to us). The complaints were just… I want to reply saying –

    WE KNOW AND WOULD LIKE TO IMPROVE THIS! But I have to tell you something – we have a handful of people and very little resources. We are doing the best we can. As a result of this, my policy is not to listen to complaints from people who don’t offer to help. Sorry.

    Then at the weekend I had to break to one of our execs that the application she’d spent so much time on, that we’d submitted ages ago and waited months to hear about? Yeah they totally ignored what we’d discussed prior to submitting it and that their “acceptance” of it was completely meaningless. Good times.

    You can probably tell, I’m frustrated. All the more so after reading about the lack of women in tech. Oh there’s a report? Super helpful! I’m so pleased!

    OK – sarcasm over. Do we need reports? Don’t they just say things that on some level most of us realize – we need action, and role models, and support networks, and inspiration… all the things that WISE is trying to do. Only we have no money, so that may stop after January. And everyone knows that my job is rubbish, so no-one wants to do it – so what about when I graduate? And I can’t do convert to a PhD like my supervisor and I wanted me to because I pay international tuition, and the university bureaucracy is anyway driving me so insane that I don’t think I want to anymore.

    However this post is entitled A Crash Course In Leadership. So here’s what I’m learning:

    • How to organize and motivate people – need to improve on this.
    • How to deliver bad news – but sometimes it’s best to keep it to yourself.
    • The importance of conviction –I am literally out a couple of hundred  dollars until our finances are sorted out. Because I believe in what we’re doing, even if I’m not always sure we’ll succeed.
    • The importance of team work – if it wasn’t for the others, I would have given up by now.
    • How to delegate, and how important it is that you do.

    Will this be helpful later on in my life? Of course. But right now I’m worried I’m failing. Which means I fail the team, which is too awful to think about. We are all doing the best we can, but sometimes that is not enough. Especially when the people who you need to support you, don’t buy in. Another important lesson in leadership, I think: you don’t lead in a vacuum.

  • Week in Brief

    I didn’t get anywhere near what I wanted to done this week. Things took longer than expected, nothing went to plan and generally I’ve got to the point where I need a break.

    For this week:

    • Finish website. With help from my kind neighbor whose cat I’ve took care of a couple of times – happens to be a pro web designer! Need to make some minor edits after feedback.
    • Finish CA Assignment 3.
    • An Introduction to Processing – make slide-deck.
    • Marking.
    • Read 5 papers – Managed 2.
    • Keep track of everything I eat/drink for trainer.
    • Go to the gym 4 times – not going to happen. Physio demonstrated that I still need more by forcing my hurt knee to hyper-extend multiple times. So now I’m back to being in pain and unstable :'(
    • #GenYOtt.
    • Recreate conversational graphs from re-factored code.
    • Get started on giant pile of papers.

    Also:

    • Great event on personal branding for WISE
    • Meeting with the girls from WISE, have a plan for our January and February talks and some other stuff too.
    • Ordered business cards.
    • Movement on thing-I-can’t-blog-about (wish I could write about it, will share when I can)
    • Had lunch with guy working on open source Java curriculum and my supervisor. Hoping I can contribute! Have some ideas.
    • Took the weekend off! Spent quality time with my boyfriend. Will be extra stressed Monday, but need the break.

    For next week:

    • Minor website edits
    • Read 8 papers
    • Clear email… it’s got completely out of hand (worse than ever before)
    • Social Capital, Trust Agents and the New Tribe event
    • Students and Startups
    • An Introduction to Processing – make slide-deck.
    • Marking (again)
    • Gym 4 times
    • Recreate conversational graphs from re-factored code.
    • Implement clique-finding algorithm for Twitter Conversation Graphs
    • Re-read 7 Habits.
    • Get started on giant pile of papers.

    Urgh… this can all wait until Monday, right?

  • Week in Brief

    For this week:

    • Finish CA Assignment 3 – nearly done, just need to make minor bug fixes and write up.
    • Recreate conversational graphs from re-factored code
    • Create slide deck for introductory Java workshop
    • Read 5 papers
    • Go to the gym 3 times
    • Rename blog (taking suggestions!)
    • WISE coffee social
    • WECS meeting (Women in Engineering and Computer Science)
    • Work on website

    I also:

    • Got a blog-post featured on Brazen Careerist! See here!
    • Spent a lot of time debugging other people’s code.
    • Went to my first Teamcamp.
    • Moved my blog to a new domain – www.cate.blog

    For this week:

    • Finish website.
    • Finish CA Assignment 3.
    • An Introduction to Processing – make slide-deck.
    • Marking.
    • Read 5 papers.
    • Keep track of everything I eat/drink for trainer.
    • Go to the gym 4 times.
    • #GenYOtt.
    • Recreate conversational graphs from re-factored code.
    • Get started on giant pile of papers.